Océ's Vice President of Marketing, Francis McMahon highlights the company's Q1 2012 performance and offers a look ahead to drupa.

My name is Francis McMahon. I’m the Vice President of Marketing and Strategy here for Océ Production Printing Systems in North America. I’m pleased to report that we’re coming off a very strong Q1 in 2012. We’ve reached our equipment revenue target for Q1, and we exceeded the number of pages we printed in Q1 of 2012 compared to what we did in 2011. That’s great news for the industry and even better news for our customers, which talks about the success of their business as well.

We had a great kick-off with our organization back in January. We’ve had a couple of advisory council meetings with our Commercial Print Group, as well as our Transactional Print Advisory Council. And already this year we’ve hosted over 34 different visits here in our customer experience center in Boca Raton, Florida.

And with that great Q1 success, we’re really building off of a very strong 2011, where we saw 48 percent growth in the number of units that we placed year over year in 2011 compared to 2010. We also saw a 10 percent growth, again, in the number of pages that were produced by the customers that we serve. And in fact, Océ Production Printing produced 64 billion pages, production pages, in 2011. That represents over 20 percent of all production pages produced in North America in 2011.

We added more new customers than we ever have before in 2011 compared to the last three years combined, and we had strong participation, which was a goal of ours, in the commercial print marketplace. Primarily with our Canon Image Press 7010 Series as well as our Vario Print 6000 for book printing.

We introduced four new inkjet products into our portfolio in 2011, and we look forward to more announcements, not only around inkjet, our professional services, and software portfolio, but a number of new solutions that you’ll see coming from Océ and coming from Canon here at Drupa in just a few weeks.

Going back to our inkjet portfolio, we represent 23 total percentage points in market share across the world. And that represents over 250 engines that we’ve placed already. We have 14 different products within our inkjet portfolio, and again we can look forward to more announcements coming here at Drupa in just a few weeks.

We’re seeing some of the trends that we’ve all been chasing or trying to produce come to fruition here on the first quarter of 2012. In fact, we printed, our customers printed, more color transactional pages than they have in any year prior to 2012, just here in the first quarter. So we’re seeing color become more prevalent in the transactional space, in the data center, and in the in-plant facilities.

Also white paper workflows – white paper workflows, I think what’s interesting there, and what we have to understand is that the professional services and consultation required to help a customer get from a statement-type environment that they have producing toner with pre-printed forms going into a white paper solution is very unique. It’s very disruptive to their organization. And a big thrust for Océ in 2012 is that—has been in the second half of 2011, is to provide that professional service and consultation expertise to our customers so that they can easily make that transition for their companies. But maybe what’s most important for our Professional Services and Consultation Group as it relates to working with our customers is that we don’t go in with a preconceived notion of what they should be doing with their business.

We have from toner, to inkjet, to black and white, to color, from continuous feed, to cut sheet, we have such a vast portfolio of different types of technologies that we can do a great job of really understanding what their true requirements are today and into the next three to five years, and make the appropriate recommendation and give them an upgrade path to help them be successful.

And if I think of anything that’s really changed over the course of the last few years, it’s the ability to provide that level of consultation and that breathe of product to help our customers reach the goals that they have in 2012 and beyond.

So with all that said, things at Océ Production Printing are going very, very well, and we’re anxious to see all of you at the Canon and Océ booth at Drupa here in May, in just a few weeks. Thank you.

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